Save Money - Buy or Rent used Textbooks, or free Online Textbooks.

Tag #Text Book Publishers, # Education Industry

Flexbooks - open source content.

OpenStax Ranks the Colleges Saving the Most With Free Textbooks To date, OpenStax textbooks have been adopted by 2,026 college systems/schools and used by 686,300 students.
FREE online introductory physics texts from non-profit publisher OpenStax College. Using Rice University Connexions platform, OpenStax will offer free course materials for five common introductory classes. The textbooks are open to classes anywhere and organizers believe the programs could save students $90 million in the next fiv years if the books capture 10 percent of the national market.

Open access Flat Knowledge textbook for U.S. history is out: http://bit.ly/IgMq0D Free on web; $30 on iPad or Kindle; $90 print (color).

Find Your Textbooks Find your Class
Access printed books and study aids Find your class by ISBN, Course Name, School or Professor. Choose your format. Order the old fashioned way in Black & White or Full Color, or take it with you on your eReader or MP3 Player.

College kids had taken to scanning their texts and sharing them online via data torrents. Then K12 open source educators started to push free curriculum and the CK12.org Flexbooks business by Bill Gates not profit business model begins. Download. Customize. Print. Share.
CK12 will distribute high quality educational content that will serve both as core text as well as provide an adaptive environment for learning. They are creating textbooks in key subject areas for secondary school educators and releasing them under a non-restrictive Copyleft and the Creative Commons license that allows everyone and anyone to download them for free and use them digitally, or pay a small fee to get them printed.
CK12 textbooks ePub format for use on mobile reading platforms like the Nook, the Sony, and, Kindle through an arrangement with Amazon, but these “open” textbooks come encapsulated in Amazon's brand of DRM, so they cannot be freely distributed in the way that CK12 intends them to be. In practice, this means that each textbook download can be used only on the device that the DRM designates. This approach violates the license that they have selected for release of the material. Amazon has the capability to release these books through its store without DRM!
"CK-12 allows one to customize and produce content by re-purposing to suit what needs to be taught, using different modules that may suit a learner's learning style, region, language, or level of skill, while adhering to the local education standards." Neeru Khosla cofounder CK12

"Wired for Books" Ohio University, the WOUB Center for Public Media, and Educational Technology for Southeastern Ohio (eTSEO) have announced that the organizations have formed a partnership to provide an instructional technology service that will be free to K-12 schools in an 18-county region of southeastern Ohio.

College textbook rental pilot not might not be making the grade 11/6/10http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/06/AR2010110604799_pf.html
About half the nation's major college and university bookstores offered textbook rentals. The National Association of College Stores says about 1,500 of its 3,000 members are running rental programs. -
The expansion was driven in part by federal lawmakers, who endorsed a pilot program for rentals because of concern over the $600 to $900 students spend buying books each year. Twelve schools were awarded up to $1 million each this fall under a congressionally mandated Education Department effort to create book rental programs, several of them targeting lower-income or first-generation immigrant college freshmen. But at many colleges, the programs are limited by the number of available titles, publishers who release frequent new editions and professors who think their right to choose course materials is essential to academic freedom. Schools and publishing experts say the programs are expensive to start up and difficult to operate.
In addition, publishers face no consequences if they fail to comply with a federal law requiring publishers to give professors the price of textbooks and to list revisions to new editions. The law, which went into effect this year, also asks schools to release book lists the ISBNs and retail price details of all textbooks on their online course schedule, so that students can have the information they need to shop around in advance for best prices before classes begin. "We are prohibited even from enforcing it," said Jane Glickman, an Education Department spokeswoman. "It's like guidance to the schools."
James V. Koch, an economics professor at Old Dominion University and former college president who has studied the textbook market, said that for a rental system to be profitable, books have to be standardized. "Some faculty members look at this and see it as a violation of their academic freedom," he said. Bruce Hildebrand, of the American Publishers Association, said students can buy cheaper versions of books in a variety of formats - but don't. "The majority still choose the traditional, hardcover, full color textbook," he said.

Textbooks are expensive — a year's worth can cost $700 to $900 — and students' frustrations with the expense, as well as the emergence of new technology, have produced a confounding array of options for obtaining them.
Internet retailers like Amazon and Textbooks.com are selling new and used books. According to the National Association of College Stores, digital books make up just under 3 percent of textbook sales, although the association expects that share to grow to 10 percent to 15 percent by 2012 as more titles are made available as e-books.
In two recent studies — one by the association and another by the Student Public Interest Research Groups, a national advocacy network — three-quarters of the students surveyed said they still preferred a bound book to a digital version.
Many students are reluctant to give up the ability to flip quickly between chapters, write in the margins and highlight passages, although new software applications are beginning to allow students to use e-textbooks that way.
That passion may be one reason that Barnes & Noble College Booksellers is working so hard to market its new software application, NOOKstudy, which allows students to navigate e-textbooks on Macs and PCs. The company, which operates 636 campus bookstores nationwide, including Hamilton's, introduced the free application last summer in hopes of luring more students to buy its electronic textbooks. A book on constitutional law, for instance, was $189.85 new, $142.40 used and $85.45 for rent. (Typically, an e-textbook is cheaper than a used book, though more expensive than a rental.)
The expense of college textbooks, which is estimated to have risen four times the inflation rate in recent years, has become such a concern that some politicians are taking up the cause. Last month, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York urged more college stores to rent books, after a survey of 38 campus bookstores in New York City and on Long Island by his office found that 16 did not offer the option.
On Thursday, students at more than 40 colleges nationwide are planning an Affordable Textbooks Day of Action, organized by the Student Public Interest Research Groups, to encourage faculty members to assign texts that are less expensive, or offered free online.
For now, buying books the old-fashioned way — new or used — prevails. Charles Schmidt, the spokesman for the National Association of College Stores, said that if a campus store sold a new book for $100, it would typically buy the book back for $50 at semester's end and sell it to the next student for $75.

In a Digital Age, Students Still Cling to Paper Textbooksnytimes.com/2010/10/20/nyregion/20textbooks.html
They text their friends all day long. At night, they do research for their term papers on laptops and commune with their parents on Skype. But as they walk the paths of Hamilton College, a poster-perfect liberal arts school in this upstate village, students are still hauling around bulky, old-fashioned textbooks — and loving it.
"The screen won't go blank," said Faton Begolli, a sophomore from Boston. "There can't be a virus. It wouldn't be the same without books. They've defined 'academia' for a thousand years."

Libraries adjust to life in the digital world
"It can be difficult to imagine a future where books and libraries exist. After all, why waste paper and energy borrowing books at the library when you can download the latest releases directly to your iPad? Why join a book club when you can weigh in from the comfort of your couch? And who needs a librarian when you've got Google?"

Library Inc.
From industry-backed research to CEO-style executive salaries and perquisites, the influence of corporate America on universities has been the subject of much popular and scholarly scrutiny. University libraries have largely escaped that attention. Yet libraries, the intellectual heart of universities, have become perhaps the most commercialized academic area within universities, with troubling implications for the future of higher education.